I have made a number of posts related to Iain McGilchrist’s work after hearing him speak about his book, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
The first time I heard him speak was in 2014 in Edinburgh. He was giving a lecture for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University. The lecture was free and open to the public, so having read his book, I travelled up to Edinburgh from my home in South Lakeland to hear him speak. Since then I have attended four four-day courses organised by Field & Field, at which Iain McGilchrist has shared his current thinking and his work on his book.
Following each event I have shared what I have heard and learned on this blog.
2014 – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/the-divided-brain-implications-for-education/
2016 – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2016/09/03/exploring-the-divided-brain-final-reflections/
2018 – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2018/03/11/iain-mcgilchrist-and-the-divided-brain/
These posts, and others, can be found in the Category – The Divided Brain – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/category/the-divided-brain/
2019 – This year I attended the Field & Field course again and for the first time ran a workshop/discussion group, in which we discussed the possible implications of Iain McGilchrist’s ideas for education, teaching and learning. In preparation for this workshop, I explored some of the themes from Iain’s book, The Master and His Emissary, which seem particularly relevant when considering educational change.
- Flow – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2019/02/25/the-meaning-of-flow-in-education/
- Depth and Breadth – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2019/03/07/the-meaning-of-depth-and-breadth-in-education/
- Two Kinds of Knowing – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2019/03/16/two-kinds-of-knowing/
- Embodied Learning. Knowing with the whole body – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2019/03/28/embodied-learning-knowing-with-the-whole-body/
The following earlier posts are also relevant to the implications of McGilchrist’s work for education.
- There are No Things – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2018/03/15/there-are-no-things-there-are-patterns/
- ‘Betweenness’ : A Way of Being in the World – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2018/10/02/betweenness-a-way-of-being-in-the-world/
- Exploring the Divided Brain – Where can we go for Truth? – https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2016/08/31/exploring-the-divided-brain-where-can-we-go-for-truth/
2019 The Matter With Things
This will be the title of Iain McGilchrist’s next book, which he hopes to publish by the end of 2020. On the Field & Field course in June of 2019, Iain McGilchrist shared with us some of the key ideas from this new book. My notes from this course are contained in the following posts:
- Coming to Your Senses with Iain McGilchrist
- The Value and Limits of Science
- The Value and Limits of Reason
- The Value and Limits of Intuition
- The Value and Limits of Imagination
- Everything Flows
2020 Wiki Notes
Between March and June of this year (during the COVID-19 lockdown), I created a wiki of the notes I made when reading The Master and His Emissary. See Wiki Notes
The Master and His Emissary is a long and very dense text – not a quick read, but definitely a book for our time. This RSA Animate video provides a good introduction.
Another very good introduction to McGilchrist’s ideas is this short book: Ways of Attending: How Our Divided Brain Constructs the World.
Finally, for details of a documentary video, which further serves as an introduction to Iain McGilchrist’s work on The Master and His Emissary, see this post – The Divided Brain – the documentary video
See also – Introducing the Work of Iain McGilchrist
Jenny Connected 